Environmental filtering drives distinct continental atlases of soil archaea between dryland and wetland agricultural ecosystems

BACKGROUND: Understanding the spatial distributions and ecological diversity of soil archaeal communities in agricultural ecosystems is crucial for improvements in crop productivity. Here, we conducted a comprehensive, continental-scale survey of soil archaeal communities in adjacent pairs of maize (dryland) and rice (wetland) fields in eastern China. RESULTS: We revealed the consequential roles of environmental filtering in driving archaeal community assembly for both maize and rice fields. Rice fields, abundant with Euryarchaeota, had higher archaeal diversity and steeper distance-decay slopes than maize fields dominated by Thaumarchaeota. Dominant soil archaea showed distinct continental atlases and niche differentiation between dryland and wetland habitats, where they were associated with soil pH and mean annual temperature, respectively. After identifying their environmental preferences, we grouped the dominant archaeal taxa into different ecological clusters and determined the unique co-occurrence patterns within each cluster. Using this empirical dataset, we built a continental atlas of soil archaeal communities to provide reliable estimates of their spatial distributions in agricultural ecosystems. CONCLUSIONS: Environmental filtering plays a crucial role in driving the distinct continental atlases of dominant soil archaeal communities between dryland and wetland, with contrasting strategies of archaeal-driven nutrient cycling within these two agricultural ecosystems. These findings improve our ability to predict how soil archaeal communities respond to environmental changes and to manage soil archaeal communities for provisioning of agricultural ecosystem services. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s40168-019-0630-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.